When looking at the CSA carrier Safety Measurement System, you’ll see that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is very interested in updating it for a more modern workforce of an even higher attention span. This comes on the heels of recommendations that were sent in through a 2017 study by the National Academy of Sciences. Back in 2018, the FMCSA had detailed how they were going to deal. The agency believes in doing a big makeover of the Compliance Safety Accountability program, like a revamp of the Safety Measurement System, otherwise known as the SMS.
Through the report, you can tell that the National Academy of Sciences or NAS has approached measuring carrier safety, all surrounding crash prevention over prediction. The agency has urgency for the circumstance of updating the CSA SMS. The FMCSA likes to zero in on six NAS recommendations for the improvements to the SMS, as it creates an Item Response Theory (IRT) model to target at-risk carriers for the needs of intervention. The FMCSA isn’t quite the most excellent at developing such a model, while the agency lays out the notice with various changes to the SMS.
According to the FMCSA, there’s plenty of limitations that can be found when testing the IRT model, as it doesn’t quite perform amazingly in the identifying carriers for safety interventions. However, in which case, the IRT modeling study shows that certain parts of the SMS is able to improve in order foe better identifiers of the high risk carriers for intention, with no complications for adopting an IRT model.
With these changes, the FMCSA has thought about changing the Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories or (BASICs).
BASICs will be better known as “safety categories” which could therefore be much better at identifying certain problems in particular. As a result, the FMCSA is hoping to combine 959 violations found in SMS with an additional 14 violations not being used in SMS for 116 different and new violation groups.
Additionally, the FMCSA is going to move the Controlled Substances/ Alcohol as well as the Operating while Out-of-Service violations will be shifted over to the Unsafe Driving category in order to let the FMCSA’s own investigative resources to assist carriers with higher crash rates. The agency allowed the Vehicle Maintenance category to be split into Vehicle Maintenance and Vehicle Maintenance: Drive Observed. The Driver Observed Category itself will specifically be reserved for road-side observed violations that themselves will be reasonably observed by a driver during a post-trip inspection or pre-trip inspection.
When reorganizing the Vehicle Maintenance categories, the FMCSA had thought that there will be plenty more “information to help motor carriers and enforcement pinpoint unsafe driver behavior and sources of vehicle maintenance issues.”
The FMCSA has been utilizing a 1-10 (10 is known as the most safety-negative) weighting scale for violations within the SMS as it’s intended to show the violation’s relationship to crash occurrence. Out-of-service violations for plenty of other safety categories, unlike Unsafe Driving, which counts as a 2.
